Over the last couple of decades, the Internet has grown to be an increasingly important part of our society. It is not uncommon that a typical user accesses the Internet at work or at school, for example, to send emails or pictures to friends or to conduct business meetings in a web-based conference room. At home, the user may download music, surf websites, watch videos on YouTube, check email, or make phone calls using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). As the selection of applications supported by the Internet grows to meet the needs of users, many users are now utilizing multiple Internet applications on a daily basis. This increase in Internet usage inevitably requires more bandwidth to support the additional traffic on the network. The need to effectively distribute bandwidth is compounded by an increase in users who are multi-tasking on the Internet, and in particular, running real-time applications that require more bandwidth than non-time-sensitive applications.
Attempting to manage traffic by increasing bandwidth or by accelerating all data for all applications without taking user preferences and priorities into account is inefficient and not cost effective. The cost associated with improving performance in such a fashion is substantial as newer technology available over the Internet requires new and expensive hardware, large-scale programming, and other additional costs to the user. Additionally, current schemes waste bandwidth on applications that can tolerate slower transfer rates, and potentially, do not allocate enough bandwidth to applications that the user would highly prioritize and/or applications where time is of the essence. For example, VoIP likely requires a large amount of bandwidth to ensure seamless real-time communication where one user can talk to another user without annoying delays, choppiness, or other undesirable consequences of Internet lag. Conversely, downloading a song for later playback or browsing the Internet for current news updates is not as time sensitive, and thus, a user would be more likely to tolerate small delays as compared to the VoIP application. In both cases, the user is broadcasting to the modem compressed sound data. However, conventionally, the modem has not distinguished between these sound files. Ideally, a system making a phone call over VoIP and downloading music concurrently would prioritize un-interruption of the phone call over saving a few minutes in music download time. Users are likely to tolerate slower transfer rates for non-priority applications if sufficient transfer rates for priority applications are provided along with the additional benefit of cost savings.